IPS, Marian, and the Free-Market Jesus

by Doug Martin

With the hedge fund Democrats for Educational Reform’s Mary Ann Sullivan, the Marian Academy for Teaching and Leadership-trained LaNier Echols, and others mentioned in my book Hoosier School Heist now on the IPS School Board, the profiteers are gearing up to cash in on even more tax money in Indianapolis.  On Tuesday, the IPS School Board will vote on placing Marian University –trained leaders in various schools in Indianapolis. 

Marian and IPS leaders plan a $2 million deal with Marian University’s Marian Academy for Teaching and Leadership to train up to 90 “school leaders” in three years for IPS.  IPS will pay $50,000 yearly to the program, which will run from January 2015 to December 2018,  The rest of the money will come from unnamed private investors.

Marian University’s Academy for Teaching and Leadership has been funded and supported by shady millionaire-sponsored school privatizing groups from day one.  The Kern Family Foundation started the funding for the Marian leadership program and worked hand-in-hand with the Sagamore Institute, a group promoting school privatization and religious work which used to be led by Mitch Daniels’ sister. 

I wrote about the Kern Family Foundation several years ago.  Based in Waukesha, Wisconsin, the Kern Family Foundation is the product of Robert and Patricia Kern, owners of Generac Power Systems, a generator company. The Kern Family Foundation has pumped money to the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), Betsy DeVos’ Alliance for School Choice (which, in turn, bought Indiana Republican lawmakers), and several other corporate school reform projects. It is also known for Friedmanite Greg Forster’s directed American History, Economics, and Religion grant program supporting free-market, religious indoctrination with the American Enterprise Institute.  In laymen terms, the Kern Family Foundation is a  right-wing Christian, free-market Jesus propaganda machine which has played a national role in in corporate/theocratic/work force training school reform movement for years.

And let's not forget:  Marian University is ran by Dan Elsener, a state board of education member, former employer of Tony Bennett's wife, and past worker for millionaire Christel DeHaan whose charter school's grade was changed by Tony Bennett. 

If all of this is not enough to send warning signals to IPS teachers, parents, and students, Marian Academy later picked up support from the George W. Bush Institute’s Alliance for Reform in Educational Leadership, which promotes the school privatization agenda nationally, as well. 

The IPS/Marian/private $2 million program is vague in the least.  Here are a few things the plan doesn’t answer:

1.  It does not say how student learning and achievement gains are going to be assessed.  Will this include more testing? 

2.  How is teacher effectiveness going to be assessed and what specific formula will be used in the IPS/Marian plan?   

3.  In the IPS/Marian document, discipline assessment is mentioned on several occasions, but there are no details on what specific discipline is going to be assessed and if the data will be broken down by race, sex and income.  

4.  With the tracking of new data which the IPS/Marian plan calls for, will students, parents, and teachers' personal information be protected?  Will parents be able to opt out of data collection on their children?

Cash-strapped IPS doesn’t need to join a Catholic university program supported by right-wing free-market millionaires.  If IPS leaders need trained, do it in-house.  IPS parents, students, and teachers should be outraged that IPS is even considering handing over money to a Catholic University ran by Dan Elsener, one of the main players behind the corporate/theocratic assault against public education in this state. 
 

Evan Bayh Loves Christel DeHaan and Hedge Funders: CORPORATE SCHOOL ALERT

by Doug Martin

With so many people saying Evan Bayh must come back to Indiana to "save" public education as governor, it is time to set the record straight and let Hoosiers know about the real Evan Bayh.

Here is just a glimpse (after only a few hours of research) into Indiana’s hero, Fox News' on-air contributor, and former governor of and senator for Indiana, and it is not pretty.

Anyone who thinks Evan Bayh is good for public education is either lying or has not been informed.  Let’s inform the unformed now and expose the liars. 

BAYH’S CORPORATE SCHOOL PIECE OF THE PIE

Back in 2002 in an article for the neoliberal Democratic Leadership Council entitled “How Bush Stole Education,” Bill Gates’ operative Andy Rotherham, the hedge fund-funded Democrats for Education Reform's former director, insisted that NCLB was more Evan Bayh and Joe Lieberman’s pet project than it was George Bush’s. 

Rotherham, who plays a role in my book Hoosier School Heist, claimed that “Mr. Bush’s education agenda is largely a New Democratic one…. The new education bill, which is regarded widely as ‘Bush’s education initiative,’ was largely written by Democratic Sens. Joe Lieberman (Conn.) and Evan Bayh (Ind.), along with other New Democrats.”

New Democrats here is a code word for privatizers like Bill Clinton and Bart Peterson, Bayh's past chief of staff.

Bayh, indeed, was a player in NCLB, the bill which set the dominoes in motion to use standardized testing to turn our schools over to private companies, many of them campaign donors.

So, it makes perfect sense that Bayh—in a scratch-your-back moment—now gets a paycheck from Apollo Global Management, the owners of McGraw-Hill Education which includes the CTB/McGraw-Hill division Indiana taxpayers have a $95 million deal with for ISTEP, despite constant errors and problems. Bayh, too, is a board member of McGraw-Hill Education. 

Evan Bayh is also doing lobbying for McGuire Woods, a mega-law firm/lobbying outfit which has represented charter schools in court, has many members on charter school boards across the US, “counsels” charter school bond lenders, and even lobbies for online K12, Inc., the for-profit corporation started by racist Bill Bennett which buys out lawmakers in many states, including Indiana.

In 2011, Bayh joined the board of Fifth Third Bank, a bank also mentioned for various reasons in Hoosier School Heist.

ALL ABOARD THE DEHAAN/HEDGE FUND CAMPAIGN TRAIN

Evan Bayh (who grew up in a small, small town just a coalmine down the street from me, years earlier; just a rabbit-throw down the highway from where Eugene V. Debs is buried) has ALOT of money in his rainy-day campaign closet.  Not much of it comes back home to Indiana.

And Democrats running with no gas money from Bayh or the Indiana Democratic Party on the campaign trail this year should know that, in May, Bayh gave $4,000 (page 11) to Cory Booker’s US senate campaign. 

The former mayor of Newark, NJ, DFER hedge fund-supported Booker is the Walmart/Amway/Bradley Foundation operative who has worked for white billionaire school privatizers since his Black Alliance for Educational Options/Bush years. 

In 2012, Bayh’s election committee dished out $2000 to Andre Carson, Indiana’s DC corporate schooler (page 9). 

Carson met with his Gulen friends a week or so ago, just on the heels of the FBI raiding the Gulen charter school in Indy. 

One of Bayh’s own protégé’s worked at Indy’s Gulen school. Teach Plus’ Patrick McAlister--IPS board member Caitlin Hannon’s campaign manager, former TFA member, and teacher at Gulen’s Indiana Math and Science Academy--got his big break as an intern with Evan Bayh back in 2008. 

But Bayh and Andre Carson have another thing in common, and that is Christel DeHaan. 

When the media and Democratic Party in Indiana painted DeHaan as merely a Republican mega-donor during the Tony Bennett charter school grading scandal, they hushed the fact that DeHaan has given campaign funding to Obama, Joe Donnelly, Andre Carson, and Evan Bayh. 

Since 2011, Andre has received $10,200 from DeHaan (see here, here, here, and here).  Bayh has received $3,000 since 1998 from Tony Bennett’s princess, shockingly even more than Indiana Democratic Party's evil foe Mike Pence did when he was in DC (see Pence's $2,000 from DeHaan here and here).

The Indiana Democratic Congressional Victory Committee is a DeHaan breadwinner, too. It got $10,000 from DeHaan in Sept. 2012.  In 2010, she gave the same group another $10,000.  In 2008, Oprah and Mitch Daniels’ friend DeHaan gave the group $5,000 and another $1,000 in 1998.

If all is this is not enough to shake you, school voucher-supporting Republican School Choice Indiana’s Fred Klipsch, Walmart and DeVos’ main Hoosier front-man, gave Evan Bayh $2,000 in 1997 (scroll down the page here).

Democrat for Education Reform’s hedge fund manager Joel Greenblatt donated $1,000 to Bayh in 2004. 

Former Gotham Capital hedge fund manager Daniel Nir, a good Bayh buddy, has also loaded (see here and here) Evan's campaign chest.  Gotham Capital is thick in the school privatization movement.

Bayh, too, is giving campaign money to DFER’s favorite son, Michael Bennett in Colorado (see page 10 here).

My new research reveals tons.  In fact, the powers-that-be used the Black Alliance for Educational Options and the DFER (both started by many of the same people, and people from Indiana, as I note in Hoosier School Heist) to make it look like the Republicans and Democrats were both on the same page, for once, because school reform was good for children.  That was the hoax.  Then came NCLB. Then came the heist.  Evan Bayh was bought by DeHaan and Klipsch a few years before Bart Peterson was making his move to school-privatize Indianapolis.

Bayh in many ways is as much a grandfather of the corporate school movement as anyone from the rightwing.

BAYN: TRAINING THE NEXT COPORATE SCHOOL WORKFORCE

As most know, Indianapolis’ first school privatizer Bart Peterson was Bayh’s chief of staff.  Other Bayh people have been and are still part of the heist.

Stan Jones, who Bayh selected for the Higher Education Commission in Indiana, now works for the Bill Gates Foundation.

The board of the Indianapolis Lighthouse Mission Charter School--now part of a multi-state outfit--had three people that used to labor for Bayh on it when the school applied for its charter several years ago. 

Former Bayh and Peterson official Doran Moreland now is employed with the Friedman Foundation, a group funded by the Koch Brothers, the Bradley Foundation, and others highlighted in Hoosier School Heist. 

Moreland runs Rocketship Education in Indiana, the charter school promoted by the Jonas Brothers and other billionaires.

THE "WE CAN DO BETTER WITH A CIVIL WAR TOUR?"

We have some great candidates running for office in Indiana under the Democrat Party name this election, and it's time to support them.

And them only.

Since so many Indiana Democratic corporate school reformers want to run for governor, the Associated Press recently asked if there was a civil war brewing in the Indiana Democratic Party.  Who knows.  But maybe it's time to start one before it's too late.

 

The Daniels-Lumina-ALEC-Sallie Mae-Purdue-Gallup Index: What Everyone Needs to Know

by Doug Martin

As a means to hold Purdue and other universities “accountable,” Mitch Daniels, in late December, announced the Purdue-Gallup Index which will track how well students in higher education fit into the US workforce.  Anyone who followed Daniels' corporate school agenda while he was governor (or anyone following the corporate school leaders anywhere, for that matter) understands that using false measurements is a way to slash art teachers’ jobs and classes, fire teachers to create a temporary teaching workforce, turn schools completely over to private companies, and train workers for an imaginary workforce so that those who do land jobs will be paid pennies because of a flooded market. Now Daniels, Barack Obama, and others are starting to use the same disaster capitalism tactics on higher-education.  One only needs to look at the Lumina Foundation for Education, the main group funding the Purdue-Gallup Index to get a clue what this is all about.  

The Indianapolis-based Lumina Foundation for Education has $1.4 billion in assets and is a major player in the quest to completely privatize higher education across the country. A private outfit, Lumina promotes the skills-gap myth nonstop so that the public schools at all levels can be turned into workforce training grounds so corporations don’t have to pay their own money to train workers. 

But the group has even more sinister motives. Lumina was founded when the USA Group sold one billion dollars of student loan debt to Sallie Mae.  Lumina's board chair is John Lintzenich, USA Group's former CEO and former CEO of Sallie Mae. Part of Lumina’s Goals 2025 plan is to have 60 percent of Americans acquire college degrees, which will no doubt increase the profit of student loan lenders like Sallie Mae, which is still a funder of Lumina (watch at 13:46 here).

And Mitch Daniels, Purdue's president, has many ties to Lumina.

MITCH, MUTZ, AND THE INDIANA CORPORATE SCHOOL COMPLEX

From 2002-2010, John Mutz chaired the Lumina Foundation, now still sits on its board, directs the for-profit Clarian Health Ventures, and is on CID Equity Partners’ advisory board in Indiana. Mutz has spent over $100,000 funding the campaigns of Mitch Daniels, Daniels' Aiming Higher PAC, Tony Bennett, Todd Rokita, and Indiana Republicans, and in 2011 handed $5,000 to Mike Pence.

A past trustee for the Friedmanite and former-Indianapolis-based Hudson Institute, former lieutenant governor of Indiana, previous Conseco official (Conseco has had its fair-share of corruption, as I point out in Hoosier School Heist), and one-time president of PSI Energy, Mutz was Lilly Endowment’s president from 1989-1993. He was also a director at the rightwing GEO Foundation’s 21^st Century Charter School (tons of good dirt in my book on GEO), an Indianapolis Charter Schools Board member, and co-chair and funder of the billionaire Betsy DeVos-run front-group, All Children Matter, in Indiana. In 2006, All Children Matter was fined $5.2 million for funneling corporate school reform cash into Ohio, but that didn’t stop them from using Citizens United and Terre Haute lawyer James Bopp, Jr. to do the same dirty work to buy out legislators in Indiana and several other states a few years ago. 

And that was when the attack on Indiana schools truly began.

Alongside hedge fund managers calling themselves Democrats and Daniels and Bush family operative and current Lumina board member Al Hubbard (who used Jeb Bush and Betsy DeVos to write the corporate school agenda in Indiana before even Tony Bennett was aware of it), John Mutz helped buy out the Indianapolis Public School board race, so that the rich could carry on their school privatization in Indianapolis, regardless.
 
In October 2012, along with Eli Lilly, the Joyce Foundation (the school privatization outfit where Obama used to work), and Enron’s Arnold family, the Lumina Foundation financed Indy Mayor Ballard’s corporate school blueprint What’s Possible. 

Lumina Foundation and Eli Lilly both have operatives at Indiana University’s Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence, named after our good buddy Randall.  Randall Tobias, a big Mitch Daniels funder and one-time Eli Lilly chairman emeritus, is best known for his role in George W. Bush’s administration promoting a religious right anti-AIDS and anti-prostitution public policy while he himself was sleeping with prostitutes.  Tobias is a dear friend of multi-millionaire Christel DeHaan and helped raise money for her charter school franchise.  One of DeHaan’s charter schools recently received an “F” grade even though Tony Bennett rigged it the year before to make DeHaan, his campaign lady, happy. 

LUMINA AND ALEC; THE FUNDING, THE PROPAGANDA, THE PLAN 

Recently, the Lumina Foundation gave $150,000 to the Aspen Institute, which has Koch Brothers’ David Koch and Condi Rice, among others, on its board.  The Aspen Institute made its name as an anti-public school mega-rich outfit when Stand for Children’s Jonah Edelman bragged at an Aspen event about using hedge fund managers to buy out Democrats in Illinois to throw teachers and students under the bus.

This year, Lumina slid $75,000 to Mitch Daniels Leadership Foundation’s Arc Leadership Award, too, and Lumina has  funded the Bill Clinton-privatization spin-off think tank the New American Foundation and dozens of shady groups involved in higher education. 

In order to land a seat on its Education Task Force in 2008, Lumina gave $300,000 to the American Legislative Exchange Council, better known as ALEC, to kick in gear the complete privatization of state universities across America.  The Badger Democracy Blog (in an article worth reading in its entirety) points out that Lumina’s talking points of making it possible for every American to get a good college education is just a smokescreen.  Lumina’s “Four Steps to Finishing First” is a scheme to tie university performance to state funding, run universities like businesses, make faculty and staff pay more for their health plans, and spread online learning onto campuses.

Recently, Governor Scott Walker used Lumina to map the University of Wisconsin System's new online learning program, among other things, to beef up the “ALEC and neo-con, corporatic agenda to create a crisis" and "defund public education.”  

By founding and funding the Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy (IHELP) located at Sacramento State University in order to disseminate negative and false data and reports to the media, Lumina was also behind the corporate-driven California Community College Board of Governors task force on Student Success report, which led to a bill signed into law by Governor Brown recently.

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education in July 2012, Eric Kelderman says that

“Lumina's change in focus doesn't mean that the organization will be spending less money, he [Lumina’s leader Jamie P. Merisotis] said. In fact, the foundation will expand its efforts by convening business leaders, lawmakers, higher-education groups, and faculty members to build consensus on specific policy measures.

In addition, he [Lumina’s leader Jamie P. Merisotis] said, Lumina will draft model policies for states, including legislation. The group is already working with the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative-leaning organization, to write and introduce bills in statehouses.”

We all know how the ALEC-corporate party went down in Indiana's public schools, and now it's time for the universities to be dismantled.

Sarah Blaskey and Steve Horn sum up best the Lumina plan for Purdue and other universities:

NCSL [National Conference of State Legislatures} has received over $1 million since 2007 from the Lumina Foundation to push the higher education privatization effort in the states. By contrast, ALEC has received $595,000 since 2008 from Lumina, all according to Lumina's web site's section on grants.

The funding stream behind Lumina's existence speaks volumes about the higher education agenda it is pushing. "Lumina Foundation is a conversion foundation created in mid-2000 as USA Group, Inc., the nation's largest private guarantor and administrator of education loans, sold most of its operating assets to Sallie Mae," explains Lumina on its web site.

Sallie Mae, lo and behold, gave nearly $21 billion dollars in student loans in fiscal year 2009, feasting on skyrocketing student tuition fees, which are directly linked to the "flexibility" efforts the foundation Sallie Mae bankrolls is pushing through NCSL (and ALEC).

In the meantime, scores of students are defaulting on these student loans.

PREORDER DOUG MARTIN'S HOOSIER SCHOOL HEIST HERE